Mailbox Monday -- November 8th

The reason why I love Mondays -- Mailbox Monday hosted this month by Knitting and Sundries. Below are the following advance review copies that I received this week.

1) A Place to Die by Dorothy James. Publisher's Summary. Murder and mayhem in the Vienna Woods? Hardly what Eleanor and Franz Fabian expect when they arrive from New York to spend Christmas with Franz’s mother who has just reluctantly moved into a sedate retirement home. A long-married middle-aged couple, they are bored with each other and with their habitual quibbling mode of communication. They are in no mood to deal with the insoluble problems of an aged parent. To Franz’s chagrin, Eleanor gleefully escapes the role of bored wife to try herself out as amateur sleuth, would-be assistant to Inspector Büchner, a detective with a sense of history as well as a sense of humor. He tracks down the murderer against a backdrop of Viennese history, the history that has formed a backdrop to the lives of the elderly residents, from the Nazi years to the present day.

Thanks to the author!

2) How the Government Got in Your Backyard by Jeff Gilman and Eric Heberlig. Publisher's Summary Biotechnology — the future or a genetic time bomb? Renewable fuels — the key to cleaner air or just corporate welfare? Greenhouse gasses — baking the earth to death or just a needless worry? Plant patents — improving gardens and farms or just profiteering? When you stop to think about it, the government has its hand in every important environmental issue. And with the left and the right raucously disagreeing about whether the government’s policies are for good or for evil, it’s impossible for a concerned citizen to know what to think.

How the Government Got in Your Backyard distills the science, the politics, and the unbiased, nonpartisan truth behind hot-button environmental issues from pesticides to global warming. By clearly representing what the left says, what the right says, what the science is, and what the facts are, Gillman and Heberlig don’t set out to provide the answer — they light the path so concerned citizens can uncover their own true and informed opinion. In this season of political discontent, the unbiased truth about environmental policies — free of political agendas — is as refreshing as it is fascinating.

How the Government Got in Your Backyard is not for Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives. It’s for anyone who is ready to get to the bottom line.

Thanks to Timber Press!

3) Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane. Publisher's Summary Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl—only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home.

Now Amanda is sixteen—and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda's aunt is once more knocking on Patrick Kenzie's door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, clever young woman—a woman who hasn't been seen in weeks.

Haunted by their consciences, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most. Their search leads them into a world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, a mentally unstable crime boss and his equally demented wife, a priceless, thousand-year-old cross, and a happily homicidal Russian gangster. It's a world in which motives and allegiances constantly shift and mistakes are fatal.

In their desperate fight to confront the past and find Amanda McCready, Kenzie and Gennaro will be forced to question if it's possible to do the wrong thing and still be right or to do the right thing and still be wrong. As they face an evil that goes beyond broken families and broken dreams, they discover that the sins of yesterday don't always stay buried and the crimes of today could end their lives.

Thanks to Harper Collins!